Appeal to the Senses & Encourage Play

Appeal to the senses & encourage play

Data visualization gurus have been telling us for years what we should and shouldn’t do when presenting information. For the most part, they’ve failed miserably: it’d be hard to argue that most data visualizations are much better than they were a decade ago. We argue that a key reason for this failure is that data visualization folks have been focusing on the wrong users – not the people who see the graphs, but the folks who call the shots about what will be on graphs. Focusing on the end user instead would mean changing the entire approach to data visualization training.

For most people, using data to create graphs feels intimidating and boring. It’s certainly taught that way in most cases. But what if we were to open it up by making it feel more like play? That would draw in more newcomers, make data training and visualization less scary for them, and encourage them to want to learn more.